A passive optical network (PON) is one system for providing network access between the edge of a service provider's network and the end consumer. The PON is a point-to-multipoint (P2MP) network comprised of an optical line terminal (OLT) at the central office, an optical distribution network (ODN), and a plurality of optical network units (ONUs) at the customer premises. PONs may also comprise remote nodes (RNs) located between the OLTs and the ONUs, for example, at the end of a road where multiple users reside. In recent years, various PON systems have been developed including Gigabit PONs (GPONs) and Ethernet PONs (EPONs), which have been deployed worldwide for multimedia applications. User bandwidth demands are ever increasing, and ten gigabits per second (10G) PONs (10G-PONs), such as International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) 10G PON (XG-PON) and 10G EPON, have also been standardized for next generation optical access. Such PON systems may be limited by a power budget. For reasons related to power budget, the number of users who can be served by each PON system may be limited to 64 and the transmission distance may be limited to about 20 kilometers (km). PON operators are interested in increasing splitting ratios and increasing range so that more users may be served and larger areas may be covered.